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Posted by D Sherman [72.47.9.228] on Thursday, October 27, 2011 at 14:06:49 :
Thought I'd pass along a trick for making gaskets when you can't buy the right one and you don't have a decent old one to copy. It's easy enough to trace the outline of a casting, and mark the holes with transfer punches if you have them, but what about the inside contour, and how do you center the gasket punches around the marks from the transfer punches?
What I've been doing with a few gaskets recently is to lay the casting on the scanner and scan it into the computer, and doctor it up some with an image editor. In invert it so the background is white, and then I improve the contrast. Then I print it out and glue it to the gasket material with rubber cement. This makes it easy to cut the outline (inside and out) with an xacto knife, and it's easy to punch the holes in exactly the right place because they're printed at full size. Then I peel off the paper. It might be possible to print directly onto thin sheets of paper-type gasket stock, depending on your printer, but I haven't tried it.
If you don't want to mess with the image editing program, you can just photocopy the casting, but you will end up with a mostly black piece of paper that wasted a lot of toner. Either way it seems to come out exactly the right size.
Here's an example of one I just did for the water pump cover. You can print it out and use it.
